 All scenes of Nazi activity in this film are from authentic German newsreel and official sources. All statements in English from German speeches are faithful translations. Thomas Jefferson has sworn upon the altar eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. If I, Adolf Hitler, can set the flower of the German nation to the hell of war without the smallest pity for spilling precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin. Not only be meditated, but carried out by official decree, American soldiers shot in the back while wearing American uniforms in open defiance of established rules of warfare. Surely I have the right to remove millions, Adolf Hitler said, and this is one promise their fear are kept. For if the Nazis were to carry through their master plan, they had to wipe out every trace of opposition. Religious opposition, political opposition, the opposition of peace-loving nations, and when our troops pried open the doors of the human slaughterhouses, we found Poles, Frenchmen, Russians, German Jews, Spanish anti-fascists, and some Americans. I'm Lieutenant Senior Grade Jack H. Taylor U.S. Navy, Hollywood, California. Two American officers at least have been executed here. Here is the insignia of one, a U.S. naval officer, and here is his dog tag. Here is the army officer, executed by gas in this locker. Lieutenant, how many ways were your fellow prisoners killed? Five or six ways by gas, by shooting, by beating. That is, beating with clubs, by exposure. That is, standing out in the snow naked for 48 hours and having water thrown on them in the middle of winter. Starvation and pushing over a 100-foot cliff. How can we rectify these crimes? We may arrest the sadist in charge of Buchenwald, but we cannot torture him to death as he tortured his victims. We may accuse the physician who used medicine not as an instrument of life, but as an instrument of death. But we cannot inject him with deadly germs as he injected his patients. We may indict the scientist who developed the gas chamber, but we cannot strangle him to death slowly as his gases strangled thousands of others. Why? The answer of law abiding nations is found in the words of the historic Moscow Declaration. The United States of America, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agree that Germans who take part in wholesale shootings, executions, and have shared in the slaughter inflicted on innocent people will be judged by the people they have outraged. In order that justice may be done. What kind of justice do we mean? Do we mean the justice of Dr. Hans Frank, Nazi minister of justice, who said? The law is an instrument in the hands of the furor for the realization of national socialism. Anything which benefits our nation is just. Or do we mean the democratic concept of justice our nation fought to establish, fought to develop, and is fighting to preserve? Public trial, equality before the law, the right of defendants to prepare their own defense, a trial so orderly, so thorough, so free from passion that no would-be martyrs will ever be able to point to themselves as victims of enemy lynch law. So that the guilt of the accused can be convincingly brought home to the German people who benefited from their crimes. That is the kind of justice we are establishing. We cannot expect ends late our traditional concepts of justice into the unprecedented machinery of international law overnight. But three types of trials are already in operation. Number one, national traitors are being returned to the countries they betrayed to be tried by the law of their own courts, as quisling faces trial in Norway. Number two, criminals who committed specific crimes in specific localities will be tried in the countries where their crimes were committed, as these Germans have been tried at Karkov. Number three, members of the Gestapo, SS men, stormtroopers, and any other offenders charged with murdering or mistreating American soldiers are being tried by American Army courts under the supervision of General Weir, head of the War Crimes Office for the Judge Advocate General. In France under General Betts and in Italy under General Ritzman, trials are underway. As fast as we can identify, hunt down, and apprehend those guilty of war atrocities against American prisoners of war, we are bringing them to trial and holding them accountable for their acts. These trials are not to be confused with the United Nations International Tribunal, which will concern itself exclusively with major war criminals whose crimes are so all embracing that they cannot be assigned to any one geographical area. The ringleaders who conceived and engineered the Nazi master plan of world domination. To head the prosecution these men must face, President Truman has appointed as our Chief of Council, Robert H. Jackson, Supreme Court Justice and former United States Attorney General, assisted by General William J. Donovan and a staff that calls upon some of America's outstanding legal talent who will join forces with the most eminent jurists of Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. They will not content themselves with hanging a tyrant by his heels, but with laying bare the ugly core of his evil designs. The retrogressive blueprint for seizing power, smashing opposition, and waging illegal war. They will not content themselves with convicting a criminal on a single count when he may have been guilty of 50, but will seek conviction on conviction in order to put teeth into the international laws that condemn those crimes. Not merely punish the murderers of Buchenwald, but the Nazi hierarchy who planned 100 Buchenwalds, a million murders, the systematic enslavement of Europe, the domination of the world. And so 1945 becomes the year not only of the Nazi's military defeat, but of their public trial, that should serve as an unprecedented warning to those who would plunge the United Nations into another criminal war in defiance of the laws and treaties of peaceful nations who have joined together to outlaw man's greatest inhumanity to man, the crime of war. I am convinced that we have an opportunity to bring to a just judgment those who have thought it safe to wage aggressive and ruthless war. An historic meeting in London was held. The Chiefs of Council for France, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States signed the International Military Tribunal Charter, establishing the laws by which the major war criminals will be tried.